Results for moritz

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  The Best Data Visualization Projects of 2014

  Posted to Visualization  |  Tags: best-of

  It's always tough to pick my favorite visualization projects. I mean, it's a challenge to pick and rank your favorite anything really. So much depends on what you feel like at the time, and there's a lot of good work out there. Nevertheless, I gave it a go.

  These are my favorites for the year, roughly in order of favorite on down and based on use of data, design, and being useful. Mostly though, my picks are based on gut.

  One unintentional theme: All of my picks are interactive or animated or both. Telling for where we're headed, I guess.
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  Multivariate Beer

  Posted to Projects  |  Tags: beer, featured, food

  Can you experience data? Sometimes visualization gets you part of the way there, putting data into context, serving as a trigger for your memory, and all that. But only so much can happen through the computer screen.

  I want to feel data the way I want to taste the food in pictures. It's one thing to see something good, and it's another to be at a restaurant to taste a dish direct from the source.
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  A more visual world data portal

  Posted to Data Sources  |  Tags: browser, OECD, Portal

  One of the most annoying parts of downloading data from large portals is that you never quite know what you're gonna get. It's a box of chocolates. It's government data sites. It's lists of datasets with vague or unhelpful titles with links to download. Of course, I'd rather have a hodgepodge than nothing at all, but as with most things, there's room for improvement.

  The OECD, which maintains and provides data on the country level, takes steps towards a more helpful portal that makes data grabs less of a headache. With the help of Raureif, 9elements, and Moritz Stefaner, the new portal is still in beta, but there's plenty to like.
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  Data Cuisine uses food as the medium

  Posted to Data Art  |  Tags: food, Moritz Stefaner

  Ditch the computer screen for your data. It's all about the food. Moritz Stefaner and prozessagenten, process by art and design ran a second round of the Data Cuisine workshop to explore how food can be used as a medium to communicate data. Naturally, you've got your basic visual cues, but when you introduce food, you open lots more possibilities.

  [W]e have all kinds of sculptural 3D possibilities. We can work with taste — from the basic tastes of sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami to complex combinations or hotness. There is texture — immensely important in cooking! Then we have all the cultural connotations of ingredients and dishes (potatoes, caviar, …). We can work with cooking parameters (e.g. baking temperature or duration). Or the temperature of the dish itself, when served!

  The above shows piece of bread shows youth unemployment in Spain. See more data dishes here.
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  An exploration of selfies

  Posted to Data Art  |  Tags: Lev Manovich, Moritz Stefaner, selfies

  Selfiecity, from Lev Manovich, Moritz Stefaner, and a small group of analysts and researchers, is a detailed visual exploration of 3,200 selfies from five major cities around the world. The project is both a broad look at demographics and trends, as well as a chance to look closer at the individual observations.
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  FIFA development work around the world

  Posted to Mapping  |  Tags: FIFA, Moritz Stefaner, Studio NAND

  Studio NAND and Moritz Stefaner, along with Jens Franke explore FIFA development programs around the world.

  The FIFA Development Globe visu­al­ises FIFA's world­wide involve­ment in supporting foot­ball through educa­tional and infra­struc­tural projects. Using a 3D globe in combin­a­tion with inter­con­nected inter­face and visu­al­iz­a­tion elements, the applic­a­tion provides multiple perspect­ives onto an enormous dataset of FIFA's activ­ities, grouped by tech­nical support, perform­ance activ­ities, and devel­op­ment projects.

  The globe itself is an icosahedron, or essentially a spherical shape made up of triangles. Triangles in each country represent programs and are colored by the three above categories, and you might recognize Moritz' elastic lists in the sidebar to filter through programs, by country, organization, and type. There's also a timeline view, which shows program development over the past five years.

  Give it a go here. I should warn you though that it runs in Flash (a client requirement), and it could run sluggish depending on your machine. Sometimes I was disorientated by the interaction and animation, especially when I clicked and nothing happened until a few seconds later.
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  Data sculpture shows emotional response to Olympics

  Posted to Data Art  |  Tags: Moritz Stefaner, Olympics, Studio NAND

  During the Olympics, Studio NAND, Moritz Stefaner, and Drew Hemment tracked Twitter sentiment with Emoto. This interactive installation and data sculpture is the last leg of the project.

  The emoto data sculp­ture repres­ents message volumes, aggreg­ated per hour and senti­ment level in hori­zontal bands which move up and down according to the current number of Tweets at each time. This resulted in simpli­fied 3-dimensional surfaces which allows visitors to identify patterns in message frequency distri­bu­tion more easily. And while not being specific­ally designed in this direc­tion, the surfaces also nicely support haptic exploration.

  The sculpture itself is black and unchanging, and it's used as a projection surface to display a heat map and overlay text. The projection is controlled by the user, which makes for an interesting blend of physical and digital.
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  How to Make an Interactive Network Visualization

  Posted to Tutorials  |  Tags: D3, interactive, javascript, network  |  Jim Vallandingham

  Networks! They are all around us. The universe is filled with systems and structures that can be organized as networks. Recently, we have seen them used to convict criminals, visualize friendships, and even to describe cereal ingredient combinations. We can understand their power to describe our complex world from Manuel Lima's wonderful talk on organized complexity. Now let's learn how to create our own.
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  Worldwide mood around London 2012

  Posted to Data Art  |  Tags: interactive, Olympics, sentiment

  No doubt there is going to be a lot of tweeting about the Olympics during the next couple of weeks, but sometimes it's hard to get a sense of what people are talking about because of the high volume. Emoto, a team effort by Drew Hemment, Moritz Stefaner, and Studio NAND, is a Twitter tracker that aggregates sentiment around topics.
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  River flow simulation

  Posted to Data Art  |  Tags: flow, Moritz Stefaner

  In Newcastle, there's a floating tide mill building on the River Tyne. The mill turns to generate power for the building, and in that flow of water are four sensors for oxygen, acidity, nitrates and salinity. Values for these metrics, along with wheel speed, are captured about every thirty minutes. Stephan Thiel of Studio NAND, in collaboration with Moritz Stefaner, visualized this data in an abstracted simulation of the flow through the tidemill.

  Particles are continuously moving from right to left, being attracted or repelled by four circular zones representing the sensor values. The overall behavior of the particles is influenced by the turning speed of the waterwheel. If the value of one sensor is above its mean value, particles are repelled. If the value is below the mean, particles are attracted towards the center of the zone.

  For example, if all four values are greater than the mean, you end up with four circular swells around these zones. In the above, oxygen is below the mean, so the simulated flows head towards the center of the oxygen zone instead of move around it like with the three zones before. So you end up with a sort of fingerprint for each window of data capture.

  The data itself is probably of little interest to anyone who doesn't work at the mill, but the aesthetics of the piece is calming and certainly evokes the context of what the data represents.

  The wind map by Wattenberg and Viegas and Drawing Water by Wicks come to mind. Oh, and also perpetual ocean.
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  Updated OECD Better Life index

  Posted to Visualization  |  Tags: flowers, index, OECD  |  Kim Rees

  The OECD's Better Life Index which debuted last year to much fanfare has been updated with some great new features by Moritz Stefaner.

  The concept and beauty of the original piece remain intact. However, the experience is made better by the ability to compare to different demographics. For instance, after I adjust my Better Life settings, I can see how my settings compare to other women my age in the US, or to French men. It's fun to compare to different people around the world and watch the flowers readjust themselves to the various comparisons. It invokes a sense of global community and humanity.
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• Data and visualization blogs worth following

  Posted to Visualization  |  Tags: blogs, list

  About three years ago, I shared 37 data-ish blogs you should know about, but a lot has changed since then. Some blogs are no longer in commission, and lots of new blogs have sprung up (and died).

  Today, I went through my feed reader again, and here's what came up. Coincidentally, 37 blogs came up again. (Update: added two I forgot, so 39 now.) I'm subscribed to a lot more than this since I don't unsubscribe to dried up feeds. But this list is restricted to blogs that have updated in the past two months and are at least four months old.
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• Learning data visualization

  Posted to Visualization  |  Tags: Enrico Bertini, Moritz Stefaner, podcast

  I listen to a lot of podcasts. They make my workouts much more enjoyable. For the most part though, I only listen to ones about sports and more general podcasts about design, technology, and working from home. However, a couple of months ago, Enrico Bertini and Moritz Stefaner started Data Stories, a podcast on visualization. Enrico is a researcher in the area and Moritz is more of a practitioner, so it's a good contrast between the two.

  Neither had experience producing podcasts before this, so it was rough around the edges at first. But each episode has been getting better. I highly recommend it.

  In the most recent episode, with Andy Kirk, they discuss the most common question from people new to the field: how to get started. Go ahead and listen. It's a good one if you're itching to get your feet wet.

  One thing I'd add (that maybe I missed as cars drove past me) is that it's important to establish what you want to learn visualization for. The purpose will change what methods to use and what software to learn. Monitoring server load for a web service is going to be different than say, designing an atlas.
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  Watching ‘wtf Wikipedia’ as SOPA/PIPA blackout begins

  Posted to Network Visualization  |  Tags: PIPA, search, SOPA, Twitter

  While SOPA and PIPA are no laughing matter (join the strike), the reaction from those on Twitter who don't know what's going on is great entertainment. Do a search on 'wtf wikipedia' for tweets from confused individuals who are trying to find information on stuff. I'm just going to leave Twitter trackers Revisit and Spot, by Moritz Stefaner and Jeff Clark, respectively, open all day. "OMG I'm doing homework and Wikipedia is blacked out wtf !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
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  The Best Data Visualization Projects of 2011

  Posted to Visualization  |  Tags: annual, best-of, featured

  I almost didn't make a best-of list this year, but as I clicked through the year's post, it was hard not to. If last year (and maybe the year before) was the year of the gigantic graphic, this was the year of big data. Or maybe we've gotten better at filtering to the good stuff. (Fancy that.) In any case, data graphics continue to thrive and designers are putting more thought into what the data are about, and that's a very good thing.

  So here are my favorites from 2011, ordered by preference. The order could easily scramble depending when you ask me.
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• Data visualization freelancing

  Posted to Visualization  |  Tags: freelancing, interview, Moritz Stefaner

  In an interview with Enrico Bertini, Moritz Stefaner, whose work you'll probably recognize, talks about his experiences as a freelancer and how he got started. Some of the highlights include how to get your name out there, important skills, and the demand for people who know data, visualization, and aesthetics. At nearly an hour long, there's a lot of good information in there.

  The main takeaway: get started now, play with data, hone your skills, and the work will come.

  [Fell in Love with Data]
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  The Vizosphere

  Posted to Network Visualization  |  Tags: Moritz Stefaner, Twitter

  There are lots of people on Twitter who talk visualization. Moritz Stefaner had some fun with Gephi for a view of a whole lot of those people. He calls it the Vizosphere.
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• Challenge: Visualize the impact of Wikipedia

  Posted to Contests  |  Tags: Wikipedia, WikiViz

  If you're like me, you've probably used Wikipedia at least once in the past week (or day... or hour). It's had a huge impact on how we find information and keep history up-to-date. The online encyclopedia turned 10 this year, and to celebrate, WikiSym and the Wikimedia foundation recently launched a challenge: WikiViz 2011.

  WikiViz 2011 is about visualizing the impact of Wikipedia. We want to see the most effective, compelling and creative data-driven visualizations of how Wikipedia impacted the world with its content, culture and open collaboration model. Potential topics include: the imprint of Wikipedia on knowledge sharing and access to information; its impact on literacy and education, journalism and research; on the functioning of scientific and cultural organizations and businesses, as well as the daily life of individuals around the world.

  There are lots of small datasets within Wikipedia articles, but Wikipedia itself is also one giant (open) dataset. For example, we've seen the history of the world according to tagged events as well as back and forth discussions for deletion.

  Can you find something good? Judged by Moritz Stefaner, Andrew Vande Moere, and Kim Rees, among others, winners get to attend WikiSym on the house and of course get a mention or two.
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  Custom maps in Processing

  Posted to Quicklinks  |  Tags: maps, Processing, TileMill

  Till Nagel teaches you how to design custom maps in Processing with TileMill. Could come in handy one day. Saving for later. [via]
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  Better Life Index measures well-being across countries

  Posted to Visualization  |  Tags: interactive, life, OECD, quality, world

  OECD, with the help of Moritz Stefaner and Raureif, promote a well-being index beyond GDP in the Better Life Initiative:

  There is more to life than the cold numbers of GDP and economic statistics — This index allows you to compare well-being across countries, based on 11 tpoics the OECD has identified as essential, in the areas of material living conditions and quality of life.

  Based on topics such as health, housing, and education, each country is represented with a flower, and each petal on a flower represents a metric. The higher the index, the higher the flower appears on the vertical axis, and if the flower metaphor is too abstract for you, roll over each flower to see the breakdown by bar graph.
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